Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

This Pulitzer Prize-winning sweep of human history considers why Europeans were able to conquer, displace, and decimate Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse. An evolutionary biologist and a winner of the National Medal of Science, Jared Diamond here dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors he sees as responsible for history's broadest patterns. The story begins 13,000 years ago, when all humans were Stone Age hunter-gatherers. The paths of societal development on different continents then began to diverge greatly. Early domestication of wild plants and animals in Mesopotamia, China, Mesoamerica, the southeastern United States, and other areas gave people of those regions a head start. For those living farther out from these centers, climate and geography had a significant impact on food production. Diamond argues that societies that needed to advance beyond the hunter-gatherer stage to survive were more likely to develop writing, transport, technology, government, and organized religion. They were also apt to create sophisticated weapons, export deadly diseases, and expand to new homelands at the expense of other peoples. This edition contains a new preface and afterword that extend the book's significance to modern economies and geopolitics.

"The scope and the explanatory power of this book are astounding."—The New Yorker